Summary

The first poem of the collection, “The House that Jack Built,” takes its title from an old British nursery rhyme. The poem itself uses trees, more specifically wood, as a touchstone of time, and tracks the continuous narrative of growth and destruction, birth and rebirth, experienced by trees over a time period spanning several ages. Beginning with when the first trees were felled, the piece progresses through several generations of trees being used for gates, forts, houses, timber, fuel, et cetera until finally turning into the farmhouse that becomes the primary setting for the collection: Lamanby.

The next poem, “Every Creeping Thing” consists of four stanzas written in a metered rhyme known as limerick. As the poem progresses, the speaker lists out a series of faintly dark and eerie images. “By leech, by water mite,/by the snail on its slick of light...